


an interlude

by villanellogy



Category: Killing Eve (TV 2018)
Genre: F/F, [banging pots and pans] let! them! be! soft!, eve is on a mission to tell every stranger in london she has a girlfriend, first half: eve is being tailed through london, it gets saucy toward the end, post 3x08, second half: eve cooks risotto for her girlfriend, tallulah shark rights
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-06-12
Updated: 2020-06-12
Packaged: 2021-03-03 23:20:42
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,747
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24673759
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/villanellogy/pseuds/villanellogy
Summary: They’ve been carving out borrowed time to discover each other again, properly this time.Or: the one where Eve just wants to buy her lover gelato, but reality is beginning to set back in.
Relationships: Eve Polastri/Villanelle | Oksana Astankova
Comments: 39
Kudos: 469





	an interlude

**Author's Note:**

> I'm not smart enough to speculate what happens in season 4, but I DO know that V and Eve deserve a goddamn break together. This is what happens at the end of that break.

Eve is adjusting one of the shopping bags on her shoulder so that the gelato is not uncomfortably cold at her hip when she realizes someone is tailing her.

Her first, instinctual reaction is to roll her eyes, because _honestly,_ couldn’t the Twelve have better timing? Come to call on a day that she isn’t lugging three bags of groceries, or one that she doesn’t have plans to re-attempt the risotto that she and Villanelle had tried and ruined the week prior? And the fucking cream is probably going to go off by the time she shakes the tail and wends her way back to the tucked-away Shoreditch flat that she’s about a week away from calling _home_. Not to mention the aforementioned (sinfully expensive) raspberry gelato that Villanelle loves, which is now certainly moribund, wasting eight pounds fifty, robbing Eve of the vision of a soft-eyed Villanelle licking it off the back of a spoon, and (worst-case scenario) potentially spilling over the rest of the groceries in the bag.

The figure following half a block behind is tall, feminine in shape, with bug-eye dark glasses and a wide-brimmed hat. She has no purse, expensive-looking clothes, and a certain way of walking that adds up to “bad news.” Upon brief further reflection, Eve realizes that “worst-case scenario” is probably more along the lines of being shot in the head and having the risotto ingredients and the gelato roll about the pavement like bowling pins amongst brain matter and viscera. The fact that this is only the third or fourth thing to occur to her says a lot about where her priorities have been recently.

Eve has been walking along the high street, which is busy with pedestrians in the early evening. Some are clearly headed home from work in sensible flats and tight Oxford-knotted ties. Some are students, with their flashy street fashion and loud presence. Eve sticks close to the former crowd, which she blends in better with despite the fact she’s paired her New Balance sneakers (sensible footwear for a shopping trip) with a luxurious Rochas blouse (a gift from Villanelle). When she stops at a crosswalk, her pursuant stops at the window of a bakery, for all the world admiring an admittedly impressive croquembouche displayed behind the plate glass. As soon as Eve steps off the curb to cross the street, she loses interest in the choux and caramel and continues behind. “Shit,” Eve breathes to herself, more for catharsis than anything, and shifts one of the grocery bags to extract her phone from her jacket pocket.

She sends two texts. One to Carolyn, and one to Villanelle. Both are identical in terms of content _(“I’ve got a shadow”)_ but to Villanelle’s, she attaches a pin of her location.

The response from the latter comes almost instantly. _Boo,_ Villanelle replies with an emoji of a face huffing angrily. _Keep your head, one sec._ Eve does, though she immediately changes her route, turning down a busy side street where young hipsters are already crowded outside bars and restaurants’ terraces. Libertines, Eve mentally scoffs. It’s scarcely five o’clock. She examines each business briefly as she passes them, wending her way around a couple of tourists, weighing her options. Losing the tail would be preferable, of course, but if it became clear that wasn’t a possibility, she could play dumb, lead the stranger to the flat, and...

No. Though if pressed, Eve _might_ admit to the fact that she finds being the only reason Villanelle will kill these days kind of sexy, she has not forgotten the empty, fragile look behind her hazel eyes when she had told Eve about Rhian. It likely won’t be possible to keep that expression away forever. But it has been just under a month since Villanelle had sent her directions to the dance hall, since Eve had first felt her tremble lightly under her touch and the weight of what happened in Russia. Since eye contact on a bridge, walking the streets of London hand-in-hand, sharing a basket of chips, looking up nearby hotels on Google Maps, talking for hours, fucking for hours, holding Villanelle while she cried and simultaneously apologized for crying. They’ve been carving out borrowed time to discover each other again, properly this time.

All this to say, Eve wants to keep her safe for a little while longer.

She rounds the corner and finds herself by a public square, where people are strolling, sitting under the greenery, eating ice cream on benches. These are things that Eve would much rather be doing, preferably without the weight of three tote bags on her shoulders and with a lissome ex-assassin at her side. As if to put a finer point on it, there is a street busker playing the violin, providing a soundtrack that would be much more suitable for a romantic outing than trying to shake off someone following you. The busker, though, gives Eve an idea.

She goes to watch him, surreptitiously checking out of the corner of her eye if the hat-wearing figure is still close by (she is, pretending to read a sign describing the type of trees that could be found in the square). When he finishes his song, the last notes shivering into the early evening air, she drops a few coins from her pocket into the open instrument case at his feet. “You’re really amazing,” she says, even though she probably wouldn’t be able to distinguish a first-year violin student from a concert soloist at Carnegie Hall. “Could I take a photo with you?”

The busker, a youngish beanpole of a man with a patchy ginger beard, looks inordinately flattered and Eve prays to every deity he doesn’t think that she’s hitting on him. She pulls up the camera app on her phone, and carefully positions the device between her and the musician and the figure, turned slightly to the side but still visible. The busker leans in close by her shoulder and gives a thumbs up, and she snaps two photos of her pursuant. “Oh, silly me,” Eve says, keeping her voice down, before the young man can comment on it less subtly. “I forgot to put the front-facing camera on, one second.” She flips it, plasters a wide smile on her face, and takes a couple of selfies.

“I’m so glad you like my stuff,” says the busker, when she steps away and lowers the phone, his grin sheepish and earnest. “I’m Merritt. If you give me your number, I can let you know where I’m playing next?” Eve, who has been flicking back through the pages of apps she never uses to see if Villanelle has texted her yet, almost groans aloud.

“I’m flattered,” she responds, though she isn’t, “but I have a girlfriend.”

Eve doesn’t stick around to get his reaction to the news. She re-shoulders her bags and turns to leave the square, heading for a different exit than where she entered. The phone in her hand vibrates with a text from Villanelle, who (Eve realizes with a lurch in her midriff) she has just called her girlfriend to a stranger. She gets a strange, untimely thrill from it, and opens the message.

_Bookstore ~4 blocks away w/ double entrances. Go in the side, out the front, turn right & round the corner. Car will be there & a decoy for good measure--have driver circle around awhile. Get me a copy of Becoming? JK XO _

The location of the bookstore sends a second later, and Eve pulls it up on her maps, quickly adjusting her route. Twilight is beginning to fall; Eve isn’t sure if that’s a good thing. The tail’s reduced visibility will make it easier to evade her, but on the other hand it will be more difficult for Eve to tell if she’s lost her. She walks quickly, though not frenetically, keeping her head as per Villanelle’s earlier instructions. The stream of people on the sidewalk moves with its usual purpose, snippets of conversations reaching Eve’s ears as she traces a path toward the bookstore. She’s glad for the crowd; though she’s not sure _why_ this person has been following her, it’s much less likely that they’ll try and kill her with so many witnesses around. Not impossible, of course, but if the tail had been given instructions to take her out regardless of observers, she would have done it by now.

“What’s your goal, then?” Eve mutters to herself, barely audible, as she catches the gaudy sunglasses in her peripheral again. Surely if the aim was to find out where she and Villanelle were living, there were other methods. The flat was rented month-to-month under one of Villanelle’s myriad false identities, paid for with one of her stash accounts that had never been connected to the Twelve (thank God for her foresight), but Eve knew even with the precautions they had taken, someone particularly intelligent could probably untangle the paper trail. So, what? Simple intelligence-gathering? Was the woman waiting for Eve to be somewhere a bit more secluded to confront her? Familiar curiosity starts burning around Eve’s temples, and for one crazed second she considers turning sharply on a heel, running smack into the shadow-figure and asking for answers.

Then she sees a display of hardbacks in the window by the bookshop’s side entrance, and remembers the risotto ingredients weighing heavily on her collarbone, and takes a deep breath. Some things are more important than answers.

She pulls open the door and is greeted by a rush of cool, retail-purified air, the scent of books and the soft murmur of voices. This would be a calming atmosphere in any other circumstance, but Eve moves with purpose around the nearby shelves, making a beeline for the main entrance at the opposite side of the store. There is a display with a neat stack of copies of Becoming, and Eve briefly imagines herself lifting one from the pile and slipping it into one of her bags. That would be all she needs, though—to cause a scene and be detained for shoplifting. It might end up with melted raspberry gelato all over it, anyway.

“Have a good night,” the security guard says, monotonous and utterly bored, as she pushes her way out the other door, and Eve shoots him a quick smile behind her, eyes raking over the store at his back. Before she turns around, she thinks she sees the barest flash of that same black blazer and wide-brimmed hat. But she’s far behind, and by the time the tail could have feasibly made it to the door, Eve has already rounded the corner and is comparing the license plate number Villanelle has sent her against the two idling cars on the street.

“For Tallulah?” the driver asks, as Eve shuts the door and sinks down, and she _swears_ Villanelle is going to hear about that one later. She meets the woman’s dull, heavily lined eyes in the rearview mirror.

“Yeah,” she says, and thinks on the spot. “Can we please book it, a bit? My ex-boyfriend is following me, and he’s not good news. I don’t want him to see which way I’m going.”

“Oh, shit.” The driver puts the car into gear immediately, weaving around what Eve assumes must be the decoy toward the end of the block. “I’ve been there, love, I know what it’s like.” Eve has never been more thankful for the concept of sorority. “What did he do, the bastard?”

Eve’s energy for coming up with lies to strangers is mostly spent, but actions speak louder than words. She undoes the top two buttons of her blouse and tugs it aside, revealing the narrow scar that still sits on her chest from Villanelle’s bullet’s exit wound. “This,” she says, moving so she can see it in the rearview, and the driver scoffs in disbelief and disgust. She hangs a hard right that sends one of Eve’s shopping bags nearly toppling over. “Yeah. So if we could just...drive around a bit, make absolutely sure that he’s not following behind, that would be...” She wishes she had Villanelle’s skill of crying on command, but tries for a lip tremble nonetheless.

“Say no more,” the woman behind the wheel says. “I always liked those bits in films, y’know? When I picked up this job I always wondered if I’d ever end up, like, in a car chase with a spy.” She laughs, self-deprecating, as they enter a roundabout and take the third exit from it. They are heading in the opposite direction from Eve and Villanelle’s flat, and the driver has turned the map function on her mobile off for the moment. “I know it’s totally ridiculous. That doesn’t happen to real people.”

Eve could almost laugh. “I guess not.” She vows to give her the rest of the cash she has stashed in her pocket as a thank-you.

“I’m Hannah, by the way. Sorry about your ex.”

“It’s fine,” Eve says, fingering over her scar before re-buttoning her blouse, breathing out fully for the first time since she’d noticed someone behind her. Hannah is zig-zagging city blocks so well that Eve wonders exactly how many car chase films she has watched. “I’m with someone much better now.” Even as she says it, she vows never to tell Villanelle exactly how many strangers she has confessed their relationship to today, nor admit to the swoop of pleasure it gives her to reference it.

Hannah, her kohl-outlined eyes trained on the road, drives around aimlessly for another ten minutes or so before switching her mobile back on and getting back to to the route it suggests, which, Eve notices, is set to finish at a building about half a block away from their actual flat for one final precaution. She begins telling Eve about her piece-of-shite ex who cheated on her with three different women, and Eve makes all the right noises of indignation and disbelief while texting Villanelle “ _Tallulah??”_

She gets an emoji with its tongue sticking out in mirth in response.

Finally, after a drive that has felt like a lifetime, Hannah slows and stops outside the address that Villanelle had given her when ordering the car. Eve digs the thirty pounds or so she has in her pocket out and lays them on the console next to Hannah’s left hand. She tries to protest (“Oh, no, I couldn’t—”), but Eve shakes her head and pushes the money closer.

“Seriously, you saved my arse just now,” she says, and Hannah will never know how true this actually is, but the determination in Eve’s voice is enough to overcome whatever reservations she has, and she slips the cash into the cupholder with a nod of gratitude. Eve collects her bags and gets out of the car, eyes sweeping over the street to make absolutely sure there’s no one after her anymore. When Hannah has driven off and she is confident there are no eyes on her, she walks the half-block to her actual building and taps the key fob next to the door. Usually, she takes the stairs to the third floor, but given the shopping bags and the adrenaline ebbing out of her, leaving her fatigued, Eve waits for the glacial elevator instead.

Unlocking the door feels like the last hurdle of a long race, and then Eve is inside. Villanelle is sitting in an armchair facing the door, her legs tucked up, a snub-nosed pistol ready on the coffee table should it be needed.

“Eve,” she says, and it evinces concern and relief quite at odds with the casual tone of her texts. Villanelle has been worrying about her, and Eve thinks that probably shouldn’t feel as good as it does to know.

“Please,” Eve responds drily, as she crosses the open-plan space to the kitchen island and finally puts down the fucking shopping, “call me Tallulah. And help me unload these.”

The music of Villanelle’s laugh fills the room, and the mood lifts--she gets up smoothly from her perch on the chair, clicks the safety of the pistol back on, and leaves it on the table. Then she’s picking through the bags, drawing out item after item and sorting them for Eve to put away in the cupboards and refrigerators. She finds the gelato and makes a soft sound of excitement, which quickly turns to disgust when she picks it up and her hand comes away a pink-tinged, slightly sticky mess. “That was the only casualty of the afternoon,” Eve says, nodding at the little carton.

Villanelle heaves a dramatic sigh, and throws it unceremoniously into the bin. “Better it than you.”

For some reason, this is what makes the reality of the situation crash down upon Eve, and after setting the rice next to the stove for use in the near future, she sags against the edge of the worktop, running a hand over her face. She had known, when she’d turned around on Tower Bridge, the choice that she was making; to be in danger together, rather than miserable apart. But the past month has felt something like a honeymoon, carefully keeping reality at bay. Surreptitious dinner dates in dimly lit restaurants, French presses of expensive coffee that Villanelle makes for her, and so much unfairly good sex that Eve sometimes feels like she should be going to church on Sundays just to cosmically balance it all. Of course it had to catch up to them eventually, but now that the moment is here, Eve is bitter at the injustice of it all, so angry she could spit, fractured and adrift.

She opens her eyes. Villanelle is there next to her, her hair loose and messy around her shoulders. Wordlessly, she pulls Eve into her arms, and as she tucks her head into the place where Villanelle’s neck meets her shoulder, Eve remembers yet again why that choice on the bridge had never felt like much of a choice at all.

When Villanelle finally speaks again, it is low in her throat, her chin resting atop Eve’s hair. “We can get takeaway instead.”

Eve laughs without mirth, and lifts her head to meet her eyes, still ensconced in her lean arms. “No. I said I was going to make you risotto, I’m going to fucking make risotto. I need something to do with my hands.” Villanelle quirks an eyebrow, and Eve cuts her off before she can start. “Something to do with my hands which results in a meal.”

“Spoilsport. The chase used to get you hot.”

“Yeah, when it involved _you._ Keep me company while I cook, I’ll tell you what happened.”

“Always.” She presses her lips to Eve’s hairline, leaves them there for a lingering moment, and then goes to pluck a wine glass by its stem from the drying rack by the sink. She pours Eve a generous glass of Merlot from the bottle they’d opened together the night before. “Drink,” she says, pressing the bell of the glass into Eve’s palm, and it is only then that Eve realizes her fingers are lightly trembling. The bitterness of the wine steadies her a bit, along with the drag of Villanelle’s nails over her wrist.

“I took a picture of her,” Eve says, ten minutes later when the room has filled with the aroma of garlic browning in butter, as she pours the rice over top to toast for a few moments. The week before, distracted by a certain unnamed blonde woman who had “accidentally” allowed her robe to fall open, she had added all the chicken broth at once instead of slowly over time, resulting in a gummy, inedible mess. She is more careful now, scraping up the fond from the bottom of the Dutch oven and pouring in a scant half-cup. The sizzling is comforting, the smell of food grounding.

Villanelle, who is largely hopeless in the kitchen but good with a knife, is sedulously dicing shiitakes close at hand. She looks up from her handiwork, impressed. “You did? God, you’re brilliant. Let me see.”

Eve stirs the rice and unlocks her phone, handing it over with the photos app open. Villanelle lays down the chef’s knife to look. “Should I be jealous?” she asks, with that inscrutable teasing smirk playing over her lips, as she turns it round to reveal one of the selfies of Eve and the violin player.

“Don’t be ridiculous. That was my front to take the picture, he was just some amateur busker playing violin in the square. Scroll back a couple.”

Laughing softly, Villanelle does, and zooms in with a deft motion of her fingers, looking over the slightly blurry image. Eve adds another splash of broth and asks, “Do you know her?”

“Unfortunately not. If it was Hélène, at least it would be the devil we know, but she also doesn’t like to do her own dirty work. And I...dispatched her last protégée.” Villanelle fusses with the app, AirDrops the photo to her laptop, and then drops Eve’s mobile into the sink and runs water over it.

Eve heaves a sigh, adds more broth. “You’re always ruining my damn phones.”

“Time for a new burner. We don’t know how they tracked you, we’ve got to take precautions.” Villanelle brings a cutting board full of neatly diced mushrooms over by the stove, lays it on the counter, and loops her arms around Eve’s waist from behind. Eve takes a peek at the sink, full of dead mobile and gelato residue, and presses a kiss to her cheek anyway.

“Maybe I really wanted to keep that selfie with the busker. Maybe he’s the next person bordering on inappropriately young I want to have an affair with,” she teases, and Villanelle scoffs. “He asked for my number, you know.”

Soft hands tug the Rochas blouse out from where it’s tucked into the front of Eve’s jeans, splay possessively on her midriff. Villanelle smells like her preferred expensive French perfume, a bottle of which she had ordered to the flat the day after they’d arrived, citing creature comforts. The scent doesn’t _exactly_ go with garlic and broth and toasting rice, but it’s not particularly unpleasant. “Of course he did, because you are too fucking beautiful to look at directly, like the sun. But you don’t need a violinist’s fingers when you’ve got me around.” Villanelle _purrs_ it, because she’s the goddamn worst, and despite Eve’s efforts to keep her cool, she shivers just a little.

“Not your best line,” she says anyway, because _really,_ who actually speaks like that? “Put butter in this pan.” Villanelle huffs a laugh, kisses the side of her neck, and withdraws to do her bidding.

This time, Eve manages to come up with something that resembles risotto, finishing it with a splash of cream (which thankfully managed to survive the afternoon's journey) and copious amounts of Parmesan to hide what is still a slightly odd texture. No one has ever claimed Eve Polastri is a chef, though the months in a kitchen doing prep work helped. Villanelle, as she does with most meals, eats it like it’s the last thing she’ll ever taste anyway. For someone who can be so prim with her appearance and precise in her mannerisms, she is not a particularly neat eater.

Despite the sight of her dinner companion swiping a stray piece of rice from the corner of her mouth with her thumb and licking it off, Eve finally feels a sense of security settle back in. The irony is not lost on her that these days, she defines _security_ as a loaded gun close at hand and Villanelle even closer. The glass of wine helps, too, though she is not drinking to the extent that she was in the not-so-distant past. If Eve were to go to a therapist (and oh, God, would that be a disastrous web to untangle), she might posit that her decreased desire for the fruit of the vine is directly related to the increased presence of her preferred addiction, who is scraping the bottom of her bowl roughly with a spoon for the last bit of mushroom and rice.

Villanelle, because she has her moments of chivalry, does the dishes while Eve checks the locks and puts the pistol back in its usual place in the drawer of the table next to their bed. “Bright side—if they’d figured out where we live, they’d probably have made a move by now,” she calls.

“Let them try,” comes the response, bravado that Eve knows Villanelle does not feel injected into her voice as she turns the water off. She emerges from the bedroom back to the main room to see Villanelle sweeping her useless phone off the counter into the bin before drying her hands on a dishtowel. Eve curls up on the couch, and after a moment Villanelle joins her, and they tangle together the way they have every night since arriving, a generic cooking show playing barely audibly on the television. Most nights, they have been swapping film recommendations, but neither of them have the cognitive energy to engage with two hours of a movie, after the events of the afternoon.

“Were you scared for me today?” Eve asks, a long while later, as Villanelle’s hand sneaks its way into her hair, twining thick strands around her fingers.

She stills for a moment before resuming her gentle ministrations. Even now, she touches Eve with something close to reverence. “Of course,” she admits eventually. “I already mourned you twice. I’d prefer not to make it a trio.” Eve laughs, though it’s dry and bitter, and Villanelle wraps her other arm tight around her midriff. “This will happen again, though,” she says after a protracted silence. “We’ve been...lucky, to have lasted this long before they started closing in.”

“I suppose they’re in shambles, having lost their most talented asset,” Eve jokes, and is rewarded with a soft, amused huff. “Their loss, my gain.”

Villanelle does not respond for a long moment. “It’s me they’re after, really,” she says eventually. “You’d be safer if—”

“Do _not_ finish that sentence.” Eve cuts her off mercilessly, sharpness creeping into the syllables. “You’re stuck with me now. We’ll handle it.” She cannot see Villanelle’s face, but she can feel her smile. Villanelle doesn’t mean it, anyway—she is, as she has been for the past several weeks, testing Eve, finding the outer limits of her patience. Seeing what it would take to make her walk away, as so many other people have walked away from her. Of course, by this point the answer is _nothing._ If being torn through by a bullet hasn’t gotten Villanelle out of her head, Eve is certain nothing ever will. “Okay? We’ll handle it.”

“Okay.” Villanelle’s voice is muffled in Eve’s hair. “Take me to bed.”

So Eve does. They fuck slow, deep and deliberate. Eve has a difficult time turning her mind off, but not even a close call with an international assassin ring can compete with the sight of Villanelle, mussed and moaning, rocking against Eve’s hand. When Villanelle shudders and tenses hard around her fingers, Eve is filled with so much love it tightens her throat, like she’s swallowed shards of glass. The sheer magnitude of it is terrifying. She wants to walk back to her a thousand times on a thousand bridges, and buy her a thousand stupidly overpriced cartons of raspberry gelato. She wants to kill her way through the entire Twelve so that Villanelle feels like she can sleep without a knife under her pillow. The fact that the same woman can beget such violence and such tenderness in Eve is stunning; when she thinks about it too long, it takes her breath away.

She traces tiny circles into the small of Villanelle’s back, listens as she comes down with exhales lifting in soft gasps from her lips. Her lithe form is languorous against the sheets when she tips sideways, off from where she has been atop Eve, an arm slung over her eyes as she recovers.

They have been balanced on a knife’s razor-sharp edge, living off of stolen time. In the morning, Eve knows they will have to make plans. But they are safe tonight, and they are together, and Villanelle is moving to press a murmured “I love you” to Eve’s inner thigh.

For the moment, this is more than enough.  
  


**Author's Note:**

> i. OKAY now you've already read it i can be unconfident and confess that i haven't written anything in 4 years...but the power of villaneve, man...  
> ii. i'm villanellogy on tumblr if you want to say hi, or have ideas of what i should write next!  
> iii. i love you thanks for reading xoxo


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